South Kingstown’s payments to send students to Narragansett could rise under a new state tuition-averaging formula, while payments to lower-cost districts could fall; officials say the statewide impact could exceed $50 million but the exact effect on South Kingstown’s budget remains unresolved and under appeal.
The South Kingstown School Committee spent part of a budget-planning workshop Tuesday sorting through a newly disclosed state decision that could reshape how much the district pays other communities to educate its students — a change that traces back to a lawsuit filed by Warwick against the state over how tuition costs are calculated statewide.
According to the committee’s published meeting recording, a district finance official told the committee that Rhode Island’s education department has decided, in response to Warwick’s suit, that so-called out-of-district tuition — the per-pupil rate one district pays another when it sends students there, often for career and technical education programs — must be calculated differently than districts have done for years. Districts had been billing based on the sending student’s own per-pupil cost, minus certain capital expenses. Under the state’s new guidance, tuition is instead supposed to be an average of the sending and receiving districts’ per-pupil costs…